


Technically, Missing

by rillrill



Category: Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn, Veep
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:53:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3545102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Honestly, whoever said that working mothers had it the hardest clearly never tried running a presidential campaign and faking their own murder at the same time.</i>
</p><p>(Or, the Gone Girl AU where Amazing Amy is missing and everyone knows that the husband did it. Right?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Technically, Missing

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a series of Tumblr drabbles last fall and I finally was like, ugh, well, why not put them all together into a cohesive story? And so here we are.

** part one: G O N E **

i.

They call her “Amazing Amy” as if it’s more fact than sobriquet, and perhaps at this point it is. Amazing Amy Brookheimer Egan, chief of staff to newly-appointed President Selina Meyer, doubling as campaign manager during the weirdest fucking election year on record. Amazing Amy, blonde and steely and striking and never thrown off by a reporter’s question or unexpected gaffe. Amazing Amy, breaker of glass ceilings and author of the year’s most anticipated tome on whether women can “have it all,” never mind that she neither has nor wants children and lives in a glass-and-steel condo building with the subordinate she married three years prior. And then there’s that husband, the comm director with the shark’s eyes and razor-toothed empty smile, always half a step behind her, fielding the questions about marriage and kids (not for four more years, ha ha!) and what not, all the while running a carefully curated social media feed for them both. @brookheimeregan. Sugar-sweet, sickening photos of the two of them (but more often just her), checking emails on Air Force One and sampling tacos from a food truck in Cleveland and altogether being the most smug, adorable marrieds this side of the Potomac. 

The press fucking loves her, save for the right-wing news outlets who love having not just one, but two top women to blame for the administration’s failures. 

The internet fucking loves her. She drops in on Jon Stewart to talk about her book and the video goes viral, because of course it does. Jezebel publishes a gallery of her best-dressed moments with commentary on what her famous turquoise dress means for feminism or whatever. She drops a series of f-bombs in front of a rolling camera and it only comes across as charming and adorable. She’s running a campaign and an administration and implicitly running her own campaign for senate in about six years as well. Amazing Amy is on top of the world.

Which is why it comes as such a shock that the campaign’s October surprise is not an unearthed video of their opponent admitting to tax fraud or unequivocal proof that the guy’s a member of the KKK.

Instead, the world wakes up one morning to the news that Amazing Amy is gone. Disappeared, without a trace. Police suspect foul play, but have yet to rule anything out.

And the question is clear as day on that early-October morning, as half the news cameras in the district congregate outside that glass building. Someone’s got to pay. Who’s it gonna be?

The answer is the same as always, that age-old proverb from the annals of true crime television and 24-hour news programming: _the husband did it_. 

Right?

 

ii.

They always look at the husband first. At least, that’s what everyone says. “Just lie low, it’ll blow over,” they say, and Dan follows every direction, appears at every press conference and search party, complies with every search and answers every question. But he forgets what Selina once told him, about how attempting to charm the press just makes him look _evil_ , and when he’s already walking the tightrope of public opinion, all it takes is one charmless smile in front of a photo of his dead wife (technically missing, soon to be presumed dead) to send him tumbling to the shark tank below.

 _Why’d you kill your pregnant wife?_ someone shouts, and he can swear he feels the ulcer that’s been forming all week burst right then and there.

 

iii.

She could never let him get away with it, could she?

Amy always wondered what it would be like to attend her own funeral. She watches the story unfold on a grainy TV in a cabin in West Virginia and supposes it’s the next best thing. Ellen Abbott eulogizes her in real time: Amy Brookheimer Egan, a cautionary tale about how women _simply cannot have it all_ — she was Amazing Amy, a Yale Law grad, a policy analyst at the State Department by 25, wrote a paper that essentially started the Iraq War (maybe Ellen Abbott exaggerates a little; maybe Amy doesn’t mind), Selina Meyer’s chief of staff by 30, and then she married _that man_ and it all went downhill from there.

 _I love strong women_ , Dan always said, and when he said it, she knew it was code for _I hate strong women_. 

Men always do this, don’t they? They search high and low for a woman they consider their equal, only to have the privilege of destroying her. Daniel Egan undermined her every chance he got; he rewrote her memoir to cast himself in a spotlight that shone almost brighter than her own. He fought her tooth and nail for every promotion available and accepted defeat gracelessly every time.

And when she finally made the decision — if Selina lost the election, she’d start putting out feelers for a congressional run in two years — he laughed. 

_I thought we agreed I’d run for office first, sweetie_ , he said, a knife-twisting smile. _You should support me for a change_. And the next week he hired the best strategist in the district to head up an exploratory mission in Albany, where a senate seat just happened to be opening up in two years.

No. She couldn’t let him get away with it, she thinks between swigs of Dr. Pepper. He needed to fall. He needed to feel the impact.

 

iv.

The question that plagues him, that’s kept him up at night for months, is what has happened to the woman he married?

He’s not talking about Amazing Amy, the role she plays for reporters and their cameras. He’s talking about Amy, his wife, the woman he – at one point – wanted to spend the rest of his life with. The glossy, bright-eyed girl from Chevy Chase, a nice half-WASP from a nice family who went to school with a Kennedy or two but never dropped names. The girl who ate salad for lunch but pizza and wings for dinner, did tequila shots with his Cornell friends like a tomboyish bon vivant, then woke up early the next day to fit in a four-mile jog before work. His partner in banter, his partner in crime, the woman who swore she’d make him President someday.

That girl disappeared a long time ago, long before Amazing Amy vanished without a trace. She eroded in plain sight for years, the shiny paint wearing off to expose a skeleton of ice. The Amy left behind was an exposed, frayed wire next to a dripping pipe. She sniped and snapped and sometimes wouldn’t speak at all. She offered her body halfheartedly for sex, then muttered “Just finish” when he had the audacity to draw it out for more than four minutes. She ate dinner with staffers on speakerphone and held up a dismissive hand when he’d interject with a question.

“I didn’t kill my wife,” he tells the detectives over and over, and he means it, he swears he means it, he knows it to be true. _Give me a polygraph, do whatever you want to me, you just have to believe me_. And they still don’t believe him. He can tell.

“I didn’t kill my wife,” he tells the press, and what he means is _the subject is closed_. 

“I didn’t kill my wife,” he tells his coworkers, but they put him on leave anyway.

The question isn’t who doesn’t believe him. The question is: who does?

 

v.

In a year and a half of planning the perfect murder, she’s had plenty of time to think this marriage through.

The thing is, the fairytale early days she painstakingly recounts in her manufactured diary – those were true, relayed as accurately as she can recall them. As laughable as it seems now, there was a time when she thought he could save her. Save her from career-woman-spinsterhood, save her from boredom, save her from the gaping chasm inside her where she’s told her maternal instinct and desire to nurture should be. The night they met, he did just that; saw her gritting her teeth through an excruciating conversation with Andrew Doyle, cut in and pretended to know her until she could make her escape.

She’d started to introduce herself and he’d laughed, showing bright-white teeth that glinted even in the dim light of the room. “You’re Amy Brookheimer,” he said, “Meyer’s deputy chief of staff as of three months ago, former aide to Karen Clarke; author of a couple illustrious papers—”

“You’re like a walking LinkedIn database,” she said, taking the drink he offered. “So who are you?”

“I’m the guy who’s going to save you from becoming _just_ your resume.”

A year and a half later, he was working for Selina; two years later, they were married. And the whirlwind truly was everything she’d hoped it would be – late night sex in empty offices, talking over each other with heated, mutual curiosity, learning each other from cover to cover. She thought she could read him like a popcorn novel, a John Grisham thriller meant to be devoured in a single plane ride – the nice boy from upstate New York, the nice boy who made good in city politics and followed Barbara Hallowes from NYC public advocate to state senator. A man with a healthy respect for strong women. The kind of man who’d go down on her until he got lockjaw. 

They complemented each other, for a time. She inspired him to rise to her level – but then he started to claim he’d always been there in the first place. He stage-managed her into the spotlight, then complained about his lack of lines. And then the issue of the baby was the last straw.

“It would be incredible for your profile,” he said as she dressed for a state dinner, one pearl earring halfway into her lobe. “Are you kidding? The whole working-mom thing – how do you expect to get elected without popping out a kid or two? We start working on it now, you have the baby in a year or so, land a couple magazine covers, put out a second edition of your book with a couple chapters about how parenting changed you, and it’s a done deal. You’re in the Oval Office before the kid’s in high school.”

Amy set the earring down on her vanity with a shaking hand. She turned to face her husband, the man of her dreams, light of her life, impeccably suited in pressed white tie, and like the moment in the Magic Eye books where two-dimensional photos turned 3-D, she could suddenly see through him, straight through to the depths of his rotten-apple-core soul. There was a profound ugliness there, something that shook her. She’d always known he was calculated, but in this moment, he seemed more computer than human.

“Is this really about my career?” she asked, her voice assured even as her hands vibrated with microtremors. “Or do you want to get me pregnant because you’re afraid that if you don’t – if you have nothing tying you to me – that I might leave you?”

When she revisits that scene for the diary, she rewrites it, places herself firmly in the role of the victim. _I’m beginning to see that I’m an object, something to be jettisoned at will_ , she writes. But in the moment, she remembers, she saw Daniel Egan for who he truly was – an obligate parasite, a weak man desperate for power, or, at least, the illusion of power. The disappearance scheme was already under construction at the time – and honestly, whoever said that working mothers had it the hardest clearly never tried running a presidential campaign and faking their own murder at the same time – but suddenly she realized that a pregnancy was the missing piece. 

Disappearing would taunt him. But disappearing while pregnant – arranging for him to find out, after the fact, that he’d been _this close_ to getting the thing he’d wanted most of all – that would truly torture him.

And after all this, the last thing she’d planned was to fall back in love with Daniel Egan.

But that’s what they say about the best-laid plans and all.

 

 

** part two: H O M E  **

 

vi.

When he sees her stumbling up the street in a white slip soaked in blood, he feels like he’s been knifed in the stomach, like it’s his own blood she’s wearing like a goddamn pageant sash. It’s like she’s Miss America on the catwalk, crowned and waving to the crowd, except instead she’s catatonic and the reporters are screaming her name. She falls into his arms and he catches her like a matinee idol. 

“You psycho fucking bitch,” he mutters in her ear, and the sea of cameras flash.

It’s the first of November.

Obviously, Selina wins. “A landslide victory” is the term preferred by the news media, “spurred on by the miraculous homecoming of Amy Brookheimer—” “—the Miracle on the Mall—” “—Amazing Amy is home.” And he’s got to hand it to her – Amy has always known how to control a narrative. He should have known from the _goddamn fucking diary_ , all those fabricated stories – the abuse, the out-of-control spending, the emotional torture he’d supposedly put her through. She knew what she was doing the entire time. Why should this be any different?

The story she feeds the detectives, about a jealous ex-flame who kidnapped, raped, and imprisoned her for a month, he doesn’t buy for a minute. He’s met Ed Webster. The man’s a soft-spoken wonk with a spine made of rice pudding and the complexion to match. Ed Webster wouldn’t be capable of kidnapping a beach ball. But the evidence lines up (because of course it does, he thinks) and she’s discharged from the hospital and sent home to wash off Ed Webster’s blood in their very own marital home.

The thing is, Dan is angry. Not just angry. He’s fucking furious. He almost went to prison (not just prison, but to _death row_ , fuck’s sake) for a murder he didn’t commit. Of course he’s angry. But on another level, the part of himself he doesn’t like to feed or encourage has to hand it to her. The woman he married is long gone, and that’s not up for debate.

But the woman she left behind – he wants to learn her. He wants to trace her bloody, sharp edges and commit them all to memory. And then, when the time is right, he’ll destroy her too, just like she destroyed him.

 

vii.

When he calls her a cunt, all she can do is laugh.

 _Yes_ , she thinks, _that’s exactly right. And what did you expect, sweetie? What did you want? Some pretty, pliant, fuckable girl in a housewife dress to stand behind you on your campaign trail and give domestic interviews to Good Housekeeping on your behalf?_ No. That’s not what Dan Egan wanted. That’s not the woman he married. He wanted a cunt, and he got one. He made her this way, sharpened her blades and dulled her brightness until she was just a shell, just a miserable cunt of a wife. And the only time he liked himself was when he was pretending to be the kind of man that cunt might love. _So spare me the self-pity. I’m_ your _cunt. I’m the cunt who’s going to be president, and you’re going to stand behind me and smile and wave and play nice. You brought this on yourself._

She tells him this, and he hits her, for the first real time. She doesn’t hit back. She stares him down and laughs.

_I still love you_ , she says. _And I trust that, in time, you will love me. And I know for a fact that you will love this baby._

__(When she hits him with the baby card, he turns pure white, the color draining from his face and turning his freckles into stark pockmarks. But he’ll adapt. Men always do.)_ _

__

__viii._ _

__He holds out as long as he can, but in the end, it’s only a month until they’re having sex again._ _

__Maybe he’s delirious, but it’s actually better than before – even better than the early days, when it always felt the slightest bit performative on her part. Now it’s feverish hate-fucking in the middle of the night, after he comes home and realizes she’s removed the locks from the bedroom doors (“I need to feel safe”). She’s early enough along in the pregnancy that her stomach is still almost flat, and it’s only the knowledge of what’s growing inside her that makes Dan burn with anger and excitement alike. For better or worse (and it’s worse, definitely worse, or at least he mostly thinks so), he’s getting what he wanted._ _

__She’ll never leave him now. He’s no longer an object to her, something disposable, a first husband like Andrew to someday be diminished to hacky ex-husband jokes at women’s interest conferences. He looks at his old plans, the carefully bulleted notes and schemes to ensure that she would never drop him, and the idiocy of bringing up the baby makes him cringe in retrospect – he could have just done what so many stupid women do, replaced her birth control with sugar pills or pricked a hole in a condom and had at it, but instead he showed his hand too early. And now, he supposes, he’s getting what he deserves._ _

__He used to think he could own her, slowly take control of every aspect of her life until she could no longer call a shot without his guidance. That was the ultimate goal – to overtake her even as he paddled in her wake. But now it’s distressingly, alarmingly clear that Amy is not a woman who can be so easily controlled._ _

__“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she says. But he hides the sharp objects, just to be safe, even though he knows now that she has no practical reason to dispose of him. She needs him. He’s part of her narrative, her knight in slightly-tarnished armor, the father of her child, her future chief of staff. At least she gives him that much._ _

__“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she says, but it’s the fear that turns him on._ _

__

__ix._ _

__They sell the first baby pictures to People Magazine. There’s a whole spread – Amy clutching a blue bundle, Dan beaming over her shoulder, both of them staring at their son with awestruck joy. She signs another book deal almost immediately after the birth, another memoir about the kidnapping and the pregnancy and what it means to truly have it all._ _

__The baby isn’t much of a miracle, in her estimation, but he looks like Dan, dark hair and a strong chin with her pale skin, and she knows that this is her ace in the hole. Because now Dan can never leave her. She’ll pull out all the moves and he still may never trust her again, may never love her the way he used to (as if he ever really did), but they’re connected now. For eternity. And this is what he wanted, wasn’t it?_ _

__

__x._ _

_Fifteen years after._

__It’s like he always imagined it. Senator Dan Egan, all in black tie, pressed suit, pasted-on smile, standing behind his wife – Amazing Amy, light of his life, mother of his child, survivor eternal – as she is sworn in as the Vice President of the United States._ _

__God, he wants to tell the President to watch his back._ _


End file.
